Saturday, March 20, 2010

Mammograms May Actually Boost the Risk of Breast Cancer in Some High-risk Women

Dutch researchers analysed six previously published studies, four examining the effect of low-dose radition exposure from mammography among women with the genetic mutation boosting breast cancer risk and tow looking at the effect of radition from screening in women with a family history of breast cancer.

"Women who were exposed before the age of 20 had a 2.5 times increased risk of breast cancer," said Martine Jansen-van der Weide, an epidemiologist and researcher at the University Medical Center Groningen, in the Netherlands. So did women with five or more exposures.

We cannot say for sure for or against mammograms but while many medical experts still recommend regular mammograms, which take an x-ray like photograph of the breast, to detect small tumours, opposition to the practice is growing.

You have options Tumours that grow in the breast are fed by blood vessels generated by the cancer, this means that those blood vessels are not controlled by the automatic nervous system like the rest of the blood vessels in the breast. A non-invasive and no-squishing method for detecting masses in the breast is available. Ask your doctor about a new method called thermography, that uses thermal imaging to detect "hot spots" in the breast.